I am an atheist. I make no secret of it; it’s in the banner. So take it from me when I tell you this has been a strange week, because I have spent it nodding along — hard — with Candace Owens and Matt Walsh. Not on everything. On one thing: both of them looked at conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey’s latest pronouncement and said, in public, in their own words, what I would have said. The pronouncement is the problem. And the way it fell apart, inside her own camp, in about forty-eight hours, is the story.

Here is what Stuckey said, on her podcast, in a clip that has since been deleted. Christians, she said, shouldn’t be fans of horror in general. “I don’t think you should be reading books that make you scared. I don’t think that you should be… watching movies that make you scared.” Her scriptural hook: how many times does the Bible say “do not fear” — and yet we purposely consume content meant to scare us. She went further. Even Law & Order: SVU, she said, “is actually a direct contradiction of Jesus’s command to not fear.” Not a taste judgment. A commandment. Being scared on purpose is disobedience.

I wrote about this last week, from the outside — the Bible’s actual prohibitions and where their logic leads. This week the rebuttal came from the inside, and it came from every direction at once.

First, the little guy, because he answered sharpest and named the thing best. BabylonBibi Beyond Satire — a satire channel with fewer than three thousand subscribers — calls Stuckey’s method verses-as-Legos, and I’ve stolen the image from him with credit, because it’s perfect. Rummage the bin. Click together whatever bricks build today’s opinion. Snap a verse onto the end so it looks load-bearing. Tomorrow, rummage again and build the opposite. His word for the product: bubblegum Christianity — opinion in a verse wrapper, chewed for the flavor and stuck under the desk.

Then a Christian horror fan named Emily Butler — a mother, filming in a witch costume, who agrees with Stuckey on most things — landed the cleanest factual hit of the week. Stuckey’s own exhibit, offered as the sort of thing her mother was right to keep from her, was Signs. Signs is a film about a pastor who loses his faith when his wife dies and gets it back, on his knees, begging God to save his son. It is one of the most overtly Christian movies Hollywood has ever made. When your star witness testifies for the other side, you have not watched the thing you are condemning. You have only condemned it.

Then Matt Walsh weighed in, and he did not hedge. Horror, he wrote, is “the most Christian genre of film” — “the only genre where the priest might actually be the good guy. Horror has deep roots in Christian thought and tradition.” And on the feelings at the center of Stuckey’s argument: “It’s okay for Christians to tell and enjoy stories that are tense, suspenseful, even scary. There’s nothing inherently sinful about any of those feelings.” He added that the insistence on avoiding those feelings is exactly why most faith-based entertainment is, in his word, bland — “bland, bad, boring ‘Christian entertainment'” is “a far greater cultural problem for Christians than any horror movie ever could be.”

And then Candace Owens — six million subscribers, the biggest microphone in this story — spent fifteen minutes of her show on it, and she used BabylonBibi’s word. Stuckey’s material, she said, “is just her opinion, but she always wraps it up in a Bible verse. It’s like bubblegum Christianity.” Owens’ charge is about honesty. “She can never give her opinion without somehow making it righteous. And that’s very dangerous.” Give your opinion for free, Owens says. Say it’s your opinion. Let people take it or leave it. What you may not do is ordain your opinion — present a preference as a command from God because you lack the nerve to let it stand as yours.

Her sharpest point is the exegesis, and it’s the one an atheist can only applaud from the cheap seats. “Do not fear,” Owens argues, is a command to be courageous in the face of real evil — “He’s not saying don’t pretend none of it’s happening.” Stuckey reads it backwards: a verse about standing your ground becomes a verse about avoiding anything that makes your heart beat faster, including fiction, including stories where good faces evil and wins. Owens’ verdict deserves to be quoted whole: “when you see true evil, it inspires you to be good.” That is Walsh’s point and Butler’s point and, for that matter, the Bible’s own point, in one sentence.

Fairness demands her side of the ledger, so here it is. She had defenders. Pastor Gregg Kite wrote the strongest of them, agreeing that horror is objectively bad for the soul — but he built his case on Philippians 4:8 and called her “do not fear” reasoning atrocious, which tells you what he thought of the argument he was rescuing. Kyle Mann of the Babylon Bee defended her personally, and defended the position — the narrowed one, after the walk-back. Samantha DeLoach argued that horror means watching innocent people suffer without justice. Emily Jashinsky, her friend, defended her on air and pushed back on nothing. Read the whole list and notice what’s missing from it: a single defender of the argument Allie Beth Stuckey actually made. Her side defended her conclusion with other arguments, or defended her and skipped the argument entirely. The proof-text at the center of her ban went undefended — even by the people who agree with her.

So let me be precise about where I stand, because agreement this broad makes me nervous too. I do not sign Owens’ theology. She defends horror because she believes evil is real, demonic, and must be confronted; I need no demonology to defend it — a story is not a sin, and a rule that bans SVU bans the evening news by suppertime and half the Bible by the weekend. Walsh defends the genre because it’s Christian; I defend it because it’s stories, and free people don’t need a doctrine’s permission to be thrilled. We arrive at the same place from three different roads, and I think the roads matter less than the place: the method is the mutilation. Pluck a verse, build a ban, call the ban God’s. A text that can be made to say anything is being made to say nothing.

And notice what nobody in this pile-up attacked: her taste. Not liking horror is free. Hating being scared is free. Owens admits horror gives her nightmares and says so as a preference, like an adult. The entire fight — atheist, satirist, horror fan, Walsh, Owens — is over one move: taking a preference and dressing it in a proof-text so it can boss other people around. That move has a long history, and the history of the holiday she wants Christians to sit out is longer and stranger than her clip allows. On October 31st I’ll take up the history she skipped — Owens, to her credit, said she wished Stuckey had. Until then, the Legos go back in the bin. They’ll be needed again the next time an opinion requires a verse.

And this fight isn’t finished — not here, anyway. What you’ve read is the short version: the ban, the pile-on, the verdict. Monday and Tuesday I’m posting the long one — the whole exchange laid out in order: her claims in her own words, the fight over what “do not fear” actually says, the strongest defense her own side could build for her, and the walk-back that tells you what she really thinks of her own argument. If this post made you nod, the record will interest you. If it made you mad, the record is the one you need.